Currently watching Most Haunted Top 50, or whatever it’s called, on LivingTV. They’re showing a countdown of the fifty greatest moments from the series and there’s a collection of soap actors and random people like models recounting what happens in each moment. At first I thought that these people had been involved in the clips, but it turns out that, no, in fact they’re actually just describing what happened after watching it on TV.

Now, as someone who’s just graduated with a science degree, I’m sure you can guess at my opinion of the things that happen on the show: I’m a little bit of a sceptic.

The best ones are the “possessions” when someone channels the voice of some spirit (usually Derek: right now they’re showing a clip of him strapped into a chair twitching and shaking). However, they just showed one where Yvette Fielding fainted after a séance (is that how it’s spelt?) and everyone was terrified so they picked her up and carried her out of the room and sat her down presumably until she regained conscoiusness.

Well, aside from how healthy it is to be doing things regularly that terrify you to the extent that you faint, the worst thing that you can do when someone faints is keep them upright. Fainting is your body trying to make you lie down to let blood get to your brain. It just seems that being around all these mysterious goings on has made people forget common sense.

The best thing was the way it was all presented as if it was really normal and everyday. I actually think that’s a bit wrong. You see these chat shows where some guy goes round telling people that people who have died have special messages for them, or you hear about someone who’s done a séance only to hear that they’ll die in a week — and then they do, by coincidence. How terrible must that be for the people who were at the séance?

Derren Brown, as much as I might find him a little annoying, did an excellent show where a group of people went through the whole séance experience, with spirits being channelled and everything, and the entire thing was him doing his usual mindtricks. He planted the ideas in their heads all along, and totally manipulated the whole thing. Now, I don’t know if a similar thing happens in these paranormal experiences (I would guess that most “mediums” don’t have Derren’s skills), but it does show that it’s possible to fake them very convincingly.

The rational explanation would be that it’s all the power of suggestion, the crowd mentality and fear making people see things that they don’t (but secretly do) want to see.

There’s a quote that’s relevant here, I think:

When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.

GK Chesterton

Will, I finishated my essay. I also use the word ‘well’ too much. Yeah, so I got it to 1, 600 words, or there abouts. 1, 662 to be exact. That is 92 % of the word limit so I’m happy.

I recently got the marks back for my last essay (which I bloggerated about all over the old blog - page 4) . I got 55, which is a 2.2 I’m quite happy with that. I was expecting some comment like “Fail. What did science ever do to you?” but apparently it wasn’t that bad.

I also went to see Garden State the other day. It’s a film by Zach Braff, the guy out of that comedy Scrubs and it was absolutely gorgeous. Really really nice, and very funny. So go and see it.

Hooray! I’ve finished all my work now, and I can go home to Christmas.

I just heard (on QI on BBC 2) that three-quarters of women accused of being a witch (in the days of yore) were actually acquitted! And only 500 were executed, but by hanging, not burning.

Well, I never knew that!

The recent explosion at Hemel Hempstead got me thinking about energy dynamics, of all things. This isn’t anything unusual, I often think about energy dynamics whenever I’m near a petrol station, or gas cannister, or charcoal, or any other fossil fuel-derivative, and I’m always slightly awed by the whole thing.

The energy in a fossil fuel, like oil or petrol, originally reached the Earth in the form of sunlight millions of years ago, when plants captured it and used it to make basic carbohydrates like sugar. These sugars were then further processed into things like wood. Eventually the plants died, and what was left became oil over millions of years.

It’s the efficiency of the whole thing that awes me. I think plants are only able to capture about 2% of the sunlight they receive. That means the remaining 98% of the sun’s rays went into things like heating up lizards and creating forest fires. When the plants died they rotted: the organisms involved in decomposing the dead plants would have taken some of the energy out of the plant, and whatever was left would have turned into oil. But only under certain circumstances and in certain places.

Even so, the energy in the oil created an explosion that was heard 50 kilometres (30 miles) away, and a fire that took four days to put out.

Ye Gods, I am sick of my wireless broadband connection. It’s unreliable, easily disturbed and generally all round crap.

The driver conflicts with my anti-virus and Microsoft anti-spyware and I have a hunch it caused my computer to irrevocably crash a while ago.

Plus the receiver has to be moved every couple of minutes because the signal is so weak that it’s lost on a regular basis, not to mention the fact that it’s disturbed by anything remotely magnetic, electric or metallic. You know, like the dog.

I really hate it! It just took me ten minutes to get it in exactly the right place so it could work.

A while ago I emailed the Google people about the recent addition of the words “Personalized Home” to the Google front page. People who get bothered about things like spelling and apostrophes* in the wrong place will have also noticed (I hope!) that this is the American spelling, and shouldn’t be seen on a site whose address is .co.uk!

Anyway, with great pleasure I hereby reproduce my original email:

I have just been on the google.co.uk homepage, when I noticed the words “Personalized Home” in the top right hand corner.

I just wanted to say that you should be using British English spellings on a site targetted towards British English users! The correct spelling is “Personalised” with an S not a Z!

Thanks for taking the time to read my pedantic email :D

Mark

No, I can’t quite believe I actually took the time either. Perhaps I’m practicing for when I get old and have nothing better to do than write to people about their use of SPAG.

Anyway, I was happy to receive their reply just a few minutes ago:

Hi Mark,

Thank you for the suggestion. We apologize for our delayed response. We really appreciate your thoughtful feedback, and we’ll keep it in mind as we work to improve your Google personalized homepage.

Regards,
The Google Team

Do you think they did that on purpose?

* You will be pleased to know that I originally spelt this word with an apostrophe…

Update: Hey! Check it out! It’s spelt with an S now :D What do you know?

Got this in an email today. Don’t read it if you’re a child :D

SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer’s Perspective

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 1.25 km per household; a total trip of 121.5 million km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 1045 km per second — 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 44 km per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 24 km per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (one kg), the sleigh is carrying over 375 million kg, or 375 thousand tonne, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 135 kg. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them — Santa would need 280,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 40,000 tonne, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. 415,000 tonne travelling at 1045 km per second creates enormous air resistance — this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 1045 kps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to deceleration forces of 17,500 g’s. A 120 kg Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by a force of 19,200,000 N (4,315,000 pounds), instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist … he’s dead now.

I’ve seen it before, but it never fails to make me laugh.